Tropical forests may be getting too hot for photosynthesis
- August 27, 2023
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Tropical forests may be getting too hot for photosynthesis
Subject: Environment
Section: Ecosystem
Context:
- A small percentage of leaves on trees in tropical forests may be approaching the maximum temperature threshold for photosynthesis to work, suggests a study.
Study findings:
- The study indicated a resilience of tropical forests to how warming impacts carbon uptake and long-term drought.
- Tropical forests serve as critical carbon stores and host most of the world’s biodiversity and may be particularly sensitive to increasing temperatures.
- The critical temperature acts as an absolute upper limit.
- The critical temperature beyond which photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail averages at about 46.7 degrees C.
- Modeling suggests that tropical forests can withstand up to a 3.9 degree C increase over current air temperatures before a potential tipping point.
- An estimated 0.01% of all leaves currently surpass this critical temperature but there are uncertainties in the range of potentially critical temperatures in tropical trees.
- In addition to temperature increase caused by global warming, deforestation and fragmentation can amplify local temperature changes.
- The combination of ambitious climate change mitigation goals and reduced deforestation can ensure that these important realms of carbon, water and biodiversity stay below thermally critical thresholds.
Tropical rainforests:
- Tropical rainforests are rainforests that occur in areas of tropical rainforest climate in which there is no dry season – all months have an average precipitation of at least 60 mm – and may also be referred to as lowland equatorial evergreen rainforest.
- True rainforests are typically found between 10 degrees north and south of the equator.
- They are a subset of the tropical forest biome that occurs roughly within the 28-degree latitudes (in the equatorial zone between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn). Within the World Wildlife Fund’s biome classification, tropical rainforests are a type of tropical moist broadleaf forest (or tropical wet forest) that also includes the more extensive seasonal tropical forests.